Solution: New Rosetta Terminal Copy Not Working For Mac M1 Silicon

I’ve previously written a detailed instructional piece on how to set up your new environment to bypass the new Apple Mac M1 chip’s limitations with existing package installers.

You’re probably here because you’ve run into issues with your cloned Terminal app running on Rosetta. More specifically, you’ve noticed the error messages when trying to open your Rosetta terminal (x86 Terminal App in my case), with notices about restricted user permissions.

First, let’s start off analyzing the current situation:

1. You are unable to open your cloned Rosetta app (x86) and your terminal quits unexpectedly.

2. You get error messages that you do not have permission to access the terminal app, while you know you are either the Admin or do in fact have these permissions.

3. You’ve checked the terminal app’s “more info” tab to verify that you are listed with both Read & Write permissions.

If you do not have these permissions, go ahead and unlock the padlock on the bottom right, and adjust your permission to Read & Write. You should now be able to open the app- if not, continue below for an alternate solution.

The Solution:

There are two possible solutions to this problem. The first is to adjust your permissions to full “Read & Write” if you have not done so already. This should allow you to open the cloned terminal just fine. If you already have full privileges for your user account, then the final solution is to delete the cloned terminal app entirely.

You will then need to re-clone the original terminal app (without Rosetta) once again using the original steps to do so. You can find how to clone your terminal and set the default to using Rosetta on every command here.

The real issue on why this is happening? That is TBD. My research on how to fix the real underlying issue at hand here fell short. For now, this simple fix works perfectly fine and gets you back to coding asap.